A Guide to Google Analytics: How to Exclude IP Address in Google Analytics

Main image courtesy of Digital Marketing Institute.

If you are wondering how to exclude an IP address in Google Analytics you have come to the right place. Now you should already be aware of what Google Analytics is and its benefits. However, if you are new to the world of Google Analytics take a look at this helpful beginner’s guide. 

There are certain benefits as to why you would want to exclude an IP address from your Google Analytics data. This is because you may want to exclude any of the internal traffic on your site. 

For instance, if you are running an ecommerce site, this internal traffic could include a stress test which will give you lots of page hits on a particular page on your site. Based on the reports that you will end up with, they will show a large amount of page hits, which will make it difficult for you to discern what hits were actually from your customers and what hits were from the stress test. 

The first thing you will want to do to exclude an IP address from your Google Analytics report would be to create an IP address filter. Before creating this filter you will want to locate the public IP address you are currently using. To do this you will just have to search into google.com “what is my ip address” and then you will find what your IP address is. 

To create an IP address filter there are a couple of steps, which are:

1. Follow the on screen instructions to create a new filter for your view
2. Leave the Filter Type as Predefined
3. Under the Select Filter Type menu, select Exclude
4. Under the Select Source or destination menu, select the traffic from IP addresses
5. Under the Select Expression menu, select the appropriate expression
6. Enter the IP address or a regular expression

Keep in mind that if you have multiple IP addresses or subnets you wish to exclude, you can create more than one filter. Just as with every other filter, make sure that the filters you create do not have any conditions that will interfere with or contradict each other. 

Once you create the filter, you will then want to make sure the filter works. Most filters can be verified before you save them by using the verify this filter feature. However, this does not work to verify an IP address filter. Although, you can use the handy Google Tag Assistant Chrome browser extension that will record a flow on your site that sends hits to your property. This extension has an Analytics report that will be able to show you the effects of any filters you set for your view.

Why Would You Want To Exclude An IP Address?

You may be asking yourself, why would I want to exclude my IP address? There can be many benefits to excluding an IP address from your Google Analytics account. 

You may want to exclude an IP address so you can get an accurate view of the traffic to your site, so you may want to exclude any of the internal traffic of your site and focus on the external traffic from your customers. 

This is because the employee traffic can skew your data since the employees will not operate your site the same way as the customers would. Some things an employee would do on your site include lingering on pages longer and visiting pages that your customers may not view. These internal visits and the time frame as to how long they go on for can lead you to making poor decisions in the future based on this reporting. 

There is more than one way to go about excluding IP addresses in Google Analytics. The two ways to exclude IP addresses in your Google Analytics account are:

• Filter a single IP address
• Filter multiple IP addresses

Now let’s take a closer look into these two ways to exclude IP addresses in Google Analytics.

Filter A Single IP Address

It is important to note that before getting started you should make sure that you know the IP address you want to exclude. 

Once you know that you can get started by following these steps:

1. Go to “Admin” in your Google Analytics account
2. Find the “View” column and then click on “Filters”
3. Click on “Add Filter”
4. Name your filter and make sure it is something you will remember later
5. Leave the filter type as “Predefined” and select “Exclude” and “Traffic from the IP Addresses”
6. For the last field select “That are equal to”
7. Click on “Save” and your filter is now created 

Filter Multiple IP Addresses

When wanting to filter out multiple IP addresses it can be a difficult process since singling out one address at a time can be tedious. It is also not optimal or efficient to simply create multiple filters. However, you can use regular expressions within Google Analytics to filter multiple IP addresses efficiently. 

Now to go about creating a combined filter with regular expressions you will follow all of the same steps from above about a single IP address. However, you will select “Custom” instead of “Predefined” as the filter type.

If you would like to learn more about filtering out multiple IP addresses and creating a combined filter with regular expressions visit this site.

Some Helpful Tips About Google Tag Assistant

It has never been easier to verify your tags by using the Google Tag Assistant. This Google Tag Assistant is a free Google Chrome browser extension which makes sure that your Google tags are working correctly. By using Google tags from Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Adwords Conversion Tracking, and more. While using this Google Tag Assistant, it allows you to make changes to your tags and instantly verify that they are firing as intended. 

All you have to do is navigate to any page and the Tag Assistant will tell you all of the tags that are on that page. You will be able to view a report of any errors that were found and see some suggestions for improvement. 

One key feature of the Tag Assistant is that it gives you insights about your users and can help you get your website back on track. There are also Google Tag Assistant Recordings which allow you to validate, diagnose, and troubleshoot any issues with your Google Analytics implementation in real time. One of the benefits of using the Google Tag Assistant Recordings is that they can help you find missing or mangled tags, invalid events and filters, along with so much more. This makes using the Google Tag Assistant very beneficial for your business. 

Conclusion

Overall, it is a pretty simple task to exclude an IP address from your Google Analytics account. There are also lots of reasons as to why you would want to exclude an IP address from your account. 

It will be helpful for you to know what hits are from your customers by filtering out the internal traffic. This way you can make better decisions in the future about your company.